A warm welcome with...Coffee Cream Cake

This weekend has brought me into a big dilemma. The familiarity of my indecisiveness has come back to haunt me as I’m lost upon choosing the right dessert amongst so many choices. My aunt from Singapore has decided to come over to travel around Australia for a month and her first stop is good ol' Melbourne, and she's staying with us of course. I’ve been wracking my brains for ideas of what cake I should bake. What I originally had wanted to bake for the weekend has suddenly been taken over by the stress of my mother telling me what cake to bake clashing with me wanting to bake something extraordinary to impress my aunt. I was a very unhappy. Finally, I decided to take a back a few steps, have some deep breathes and calmed down. I decided to be myself and not focus too much on impressing someone as you can sometimes lose the point by doing so. There's a chinese saying that goes by: "Don't give what you don't like". True. At least I know the bottom line for me is that if I’m not going to be happy, everyone else is most likely going to feel the same as well.

I kept on brainstorming what my aunt would like despite I could've just easily asked my papa that question. Suddenly, Kopi-O came to mind. Kopi-O is the trademark coffee in Singapore and Malaysia which is just the traditional strong black coffee served with sugar. You will always come across a 'Kopitiam' (coffee shop) in every single corner of Singapore because it's just a part of their lifestyle...having a kopi to kickstart the day. Ugh, I dislike coffee. I'm one of those people who don't know how to appreciate coffee because they all taste the same to me (just as bitter). However, I do like the smell of coffee though. Wierd huh?

Despite my ramblings of my distaste for coffee, I do quite like this coffee cream cake of mine. The first time I tried this cake was from a bubbly aunty that I know of and she is an expert on this. I love how soft and delicate the cake is and the coffee cream flavour was acceptable to my degree. There's some elegance about this coffee cream cake that I can't describe properly. Of course, my aunt gave me a thumbs up to this as well.

I decorated this cake on the go and it ended up looking like this...which turned out pretty okay I guess. It took me a while to decided what to put on the top of the cake and here I go into auto-pilot mode again: chocolate. Instead of grating chocolate this time, I used a vegetable peeler to peel off small layers of a milk chocolate block. I like the mini curls that I get out of it. I would suggest that you use a spoon to sprinkle the chocolate shavings on top of the cake instead of using your bare fingers. Your fingers would potentially crush the delicate chocolate curls.

I would totally have no reference as to where this cake originally came from since it was passed down to me in a chinese-whispers-manner. So in this post, I would like to reserve the coffee cream cake recipe. I guess I'll post up the recipe when I do find the recipe or something really similar? In this world where people are frowned upon copying and not acknowledging one's work, I would not want to be one of those. There are so many people out there who don't give a damn about these things. Reminds me of my primary school days where the boy who sat next to me wrote his name on my work once and handed it in as his. Of course, I did not back down and took it on with the teacher. I won.